‘‘As a curator, you need a deep emotional engagement with your subject matter, to invest your work with love,’’ says Andrew Bolton. The 49-year-old visionary behind some of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s most popular shows in the last decade, including the record-shattering ‘‘Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty’’ and this year’s ‘‘China: Through the Looking Glass,’’ Bolton exerts outsize influence on how fashion is enshrined in our collective consciousness. His twin obsessions are class and gender fluidity, and they are woven throughout his work. Raised middle class in Lancashire, in the north of England, far from the posh London life or the musty confines of Cambridge and Oxford, he fell in love with the local punk scene as a teen. While studying anthropology and non-Western art at university, he pored over magazines like The Face and i-D, and soon began his career working with contemporary Chinese fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum. That transgressive ethos defines him still, and sparked the Met’s controversial 2013 show, ‘‘Punk: Chaos to Couture.’’ ‘‘Those extraordinary warriors used fashion to provoke and confront,’’ he says. He is intrigued as well by how the cultural implications of dress are constantly shifting. Surprisingly, perhaps, given his taste for slashy subversion, his own style is buttoned-down, carefully askew and gloriously nerdy, similar to that of his partner, the fashion designer Thom Browne. Both revel in the paradox of seeking beauty through awkwardness. ‘‘Fashion,’’ Bolton says, ‘‘is about transformation and creating new identities.’’